For week three of Michigan history we have continued our study of the state symbols.
Monday was a look at the state stone the Petoskey stone. I have to admit to a major fail here. I was sure that I had a Petoskey stone stuck away from my childhood, either polished or unpolished to use with this lesson. In fact I was king of thinking I had both. I do have a small collection of rocks that I had as a child and have moved many times since being married. So I dug them out the morning of our lesson opened the box and it was full of agates, a nice piece of amethyst and other shiny rocks we will use later when we do our study of geology but not one Petoskey stone. I spent hours on Lake Michigan beaches as a kid on vacation hunting these stones with my parents and apparently not one ever made it to the box. So my kids had to look at a poor picture of said rock. Apparently I should have checked on this at the start of the summer before I visited my parents who do have some around.
This is the poor picture we used to teach with and added to our books. This is Petoskey Pete from one of the Michigan History magazines I had found on-line.
Tuesday was better we looked at the state fish, the Brook Trout.
I have a Michigan coloring book so we used the page with the fish colored him and added him to our books. There were two fish on the page a large one and a small one. I instructed the kids to use the smaller one. This didn't go well as Andrew insisted the bigger fish was better and yummier looking, lol.
Wednesday we sang the state song, Michigan My Michigan. we opted to not add anything to our books for this.
Thursday and Friday we looked at how our state government is set up.
We mapped the capital on a shutter fold book (from homeschool share) and also made a small book listing the three branches of the government. For the executive branch we included the name of our governor, the legislative branch included how many senators and representatives are in the state government and the judicial branch simply stated that judges enforce the laws. The shutter fold map is actually designed to map the Great Lakes, but I didn't think they would have enough room to write the names of all the lakes neatly so I adapted in for the capital mapping instead.
Friday we ended with a worksheet on voting from My First book of Michigan. (seen here).
Week four starts our look at the Native Americans of Michigan, hope you stop back to see what we learn.
Cassie
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